From Wyoming Public Radio (Melodie Edwards):
“This river, the Colorado, can be turned on and turned off down to the last drop on orders from the Interior Secretary of the United States,” a voiceover tells us. “This was the first river on earth to come under complete human control.”
But where it starts in Wyoming as the Green River out of the Wind River Range, it is still wild, flowing down to feed an elaborate canyon ecosystem, not to mention several thirsty states.
But the question is, what’s the responsibility of headwater states like Wyoming to keep that river ecology healthy as the climate gets hotter and dryer?
Rancher Eric Barnes and his family live on Fontanelle Creek near Kemmerer in southwest Wyoming. It’s a ranch his father built in the 1950’s.
“It’s a really beautiful place because it’s kind of in the foothills of the desert.”
And it backs onto the mountains where the creek flows down to join the Green River in Fontanelle Reservoir. While droughts have devastated crops in the southwest over the last few years, Barnes was having the opposite problem.
“I had been needing to rebuild all my diversions because they’d been blowed out, just from high water in the last few years,” he says. “And I didn’t know how I was going to afford to do all these projects because all the diversions needed worked on.”
And those flood-damaged irrigation gates were expensive to replace. So he turned to Trout Unlimited who helped him turn his surplus irrigation water into a money maker. They helped him apply for a new multi-state pilot program through the Upper Colorado River Commission that pays water rights holders like Barnes not to irrigate.
Wyoming Trout Unlimited water and habitat director Cory Toye says while more flow in the stream will help droughts downstream, it’ll also help Wyoming’s wildlife that have suffered from the last 15-years of drought.
“There are tributaries where we’ve seen extended low flows over the last couple of years,” Toye says. “If there’s low conditions or tough habitat conditions in particular areas, the more we can do for trout to move around and find better habitat, the better we do.”
